Poetry Reading Group

We have three new selections for our poetry reading group! With Zain as our guide, we will be immersing ourselves in a range of exciting voices in the world of poetry. If you’re a fellow poet, a poetry fan, or just looking for your next read, please come along for a fun evening of chatting all things verse!

Our June pick is Sharon Olds’ incredible Stags Leap. In equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, Olds navigates the end of her marriage and the feelings of guilt, confusion and terrifying freedom that accompany it. Olds’ narrative verse is deeply emotive and in touch with the human experience, making for one of the best collections to come out in the last 20 years.

Here are the dates for the upcoming reading groups:

Tuesday 6th May - Crush by Richard Siken

Tuesday 24th June - Stags Leap by Sharon Olds

Wednesday 16th July - Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

There’s no need to prepare but if you feel like it, please feel free to mention a poem, line or stanza you particularly liked (or disliked!) from the collection over the course of the evening.

About Stags Leap:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize

Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds' stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling - which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending - Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip.

Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, 'When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver'.

Olds' propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music - sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.